Today's computer users have access to an incredible amount of digital content, such as images, videos, and audio files. Such content, however, may be stored in disparate locations across a user's local computer, across a local area network (“LAN”), or across a wide area network (“WAN”) such as the Internet. As a result, the user experience for locating such content has in the past been scattered and inconsistent. In order to search for a desired image across all available sources, for instance, users have previously been forced to utilize multiple application programs, each with its own unique user interface.
Another complication in locating desirable content arises from the fact that content is frequently stored within documents or other types of content containers. For instance, images are often stored within word processing documents, charts are often stored within spreadsheet documents, content of all kinds is stored as attachments to electronic mail (“e-mail”) messages, and images and videos are stored with world wide web (“Web”) pages. As a result, it can be difficult to locate content that is stored within such containers.
Previous user interfaces for searching for content typically present search results in the context of the container in which they are stored, and require a user to locate and manually save the desired content. For instance, if a Web page includes an image matching a search query, the image will be presented in the context of the Web page with which it is associated. A user must then manually locate the desired image on the Web page, save the image, and then possibly perform a desired function with the saved image, such as inserting the image into a document. This process can be complicated and time consuming for the user.
It may also be difficult to group and filter search results because some of the located content may have associated metadata that identifies unique properties of the content, while other content does not. As a result, previous user interfaces for searching for content only permit grouping and filtering based upon the properties that are common to all content, such as filename, size, and creation date. Functionality is not provided for grouping or filtering search results based on metadata that is unique to a particular kind of content or based upon the provider from which the content was obtained.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.